I think I went into this one with the wrong expectations, which equaled the lower rating. I thought we were getting an exciting mystery, sort of Da Vinci code type plot. I mean look at that cover. I wanted dinosaurs in some form.
We follow our main character, who is self described small and fragile. This is touched on a lot. I assume so we see him grow as a character. I wanted more Robert Langdon here. There are mystery and thrilling aspects to the story, they just did not hold up enough for me. This was my first novel by this author. The writing style was different, and still not sure if it is for me.
I recommend going into this totally blind, and just going along for the ride. I see the potential here for sure.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of the book, in exchange for a honest review.

I really needed a solid supernatural horror and that’s exactly what I got. This is my first 5 star horror read since Tender is the Flesh and I am OBSESSED. I read this book non-stop into the morning because I just couldn’t put it down. Once you get to the second half of the book the plot twists got a little predictable, but the details of the twists were either so disturbing or so heart-warming (absolutely no in-between) it still had me reeling.

You need to read this if you like:
Dinosaurs ✅
Supernatural Horror ✅
LGBTQ+ Rep ✅
Disappearance Mystery ✅

Thank you to Luke Dumas and Atria Publishing for letting me read this as an ARC!

The Paleontologist was one of those books I was eyeing for a bit before I requested it on netgalley, wondering if it would be too sciencey for me. Turns out, I was worrying about the wrong things. While fully enjoyable, it starts off strong but then gets a little too bogged down in the supernatural stuff for my tastes.

Simon is returning to Pennsylvania and the Hawthorne Museum of Natural History nearly twenty years after his little sister Morgan's disappearance. Taking the job as Director and Curator will allow him to not only pick up where his predecessor left off, preparing the bones of their most recent discovery, but it also gets him closer to uncovering what exactly happened to Morgan all those years ago when she was snatched out from under his watch in that very building.

When Simon arrives at the Hawthorne, though, it's closed due to the pandemic and he learns it's in severe financial distress. As he settles himself into his basement office, he begins to hear strange noises that he initially shrugs off as old pipes and boilers, only to learn from the sole maintenance employee Maurice that there's something much more sinister stalking the halls of the museum.

His determination to locate his sister's killer finds Simon face to face with forces he never expected to encounter. Hell, forces he may not be able to survive...

While I had anticipated this would be more of a dark thriller - a sort of who-dun-it murder mystery - it quickly switched gears on me. Think Night at the Museum but with less laughs and a whole lot more prehistoric supernatural horror. Within these pages are ghosts that won't be easily sated.

The Paleontologist by Luke Dumas is a fun, dark novel that fuses Jurassic Park with non-stop thriller action. It was a dark read that I loved every minute of. It's an interesting, intriguing departure after A History of Fear last year, but it was a pleasant change and I can't wait to read everything else he produces in the future.

I loved this book! I devoured it in only a few sittings and wish there was more to read. The story line was paced very well and the characters were easy to love!

I waffled between 3 and 4 stars for this; I'm rounding up, I think.

I’m not entirely sure how to classify the genre of this book: mystery? Gothic? Literary thriller? Whatever its genre, I really enjoyed it. The standout feature was the atmosphere: the book is largely set at a run-down, crumbling natural history museum, the new employer of our protagonist (and the place where his sister disappeared, when they were both children). The descriptions were gorgeous and wildly evocative. The paleontology content was also deeply interesting and compelling, and made the book more engaging for me, and did a lot to deepen the characterization!

I think the book’s major flaw is that it tried to do too much: it’s a mystery with fantasy elements, it’s a literary drama, it’s a COVID pandemic novel ... and it had a hard time being all those things at once. Will definitely read more of this author in the future, and I’d recommend this if the premise sounds intriguing!

Thanks to Atria Books and Netgalley for the advance copy!

I love mysteries and I have always loved museums. I have had a fascination with dinosaurs thanks to jurassic park lol

This book is a bit different than my normal mysteries but I really enjoyed it.

Paleontologist Simon Nealy is setting uncomfortably into his new job at the Hawthorne Museum of Natural History, a facility on the edge of disaster. The dark halls, which are still closed due to the pandemic, are stained with mildew and water damage. Badly stored fossils crumble under his hands. Almost all of the staff is working remotely and his only contact with them is through the spotty internet connection. A maintenance man warns him that if he hears noises after dark, not to go looking for what caused them. Simon came to the museum hoping to discover what happened to his six year old sister, who was taken from the insect hall decades earlier. What he finds are impossible bloody footprints and the shadows of ancient creatures. This upernatural thriller. gets off to a slow start, but once the pace picks up, it's a wildly enjoyable ride.

This was a riveting book! It took a little while to gain traction for me but once it did it was a fantastic read. I look forward to more books from the author.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of The Paleontologist.

When I was young, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I also wanted to be a rock star, an artist, a FBI agent, and lots others I can't remember.

The narrative starts slowly, very slowly, as the author provides plenty of exposition on the museum, its contents, and its financial instability.

In fact, most of the narrative is focused on the museum's finances and its struggles during the pandemic, as well as Simon's tumultuous childhood and upbringing.

I've read The History of Fear and noticed the author's main characters all come from troubled childhoods.

Mr. Dumas tends to dwell on his characters' pasts, as if to explain to the reader why this character is the way he is because he had bad parents.

But dwelling on the past and Simon's anxieties soon got repetitive and tedious to read about.

I'm also not a fan of the 'monster in the museum' theme. It doesn't spook or frighten me. I love books with supernatural themes but I wasn't scared at all.

I was invested in finding out what happened to Morgan but it took too long to get there and when all was revealed, the reason why felt unsatisfying.

I didn't like Simon, nor did I dislike him. I just didn't care about him.

His meek and mild disposition didn't endear me to him, which might be due to his unstable mother, but he wasn't a protagonist I rooted for.

If I had to pick a character I would have liked to know more about, it would be Fran. I did like how her and Simon's relationship improved at the end.

I loved the illustrations; they're beautiful, and I wished there had been more of them.

I also enjoyed learning about dinosaurs and the lengthy and laborious process it takes to organize, categorize, stage, and mount a dinosaur specimen for display for visitors to enjoy.

We take for granted the beautiful displays we see in the museum and don't realize all the thousands of hours of work it takes into setting it up.

The writing is good and the author did do his research on paleontology, but the narrative wasn't suspenseful and exciting, and Simon isn't a compelling or engaging character to carry the story.

“𝑰𝒏 𝒅𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒎𝒖𝒄𝒉 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒕, 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒏𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒐𝒐 𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒍𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒃𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅. 𝑰 𝒔𝒂𝒚, 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒔 𝒂𝒍𝒘𝒂𝒚𝒔 𝒉𝒐𝒑𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒇𝒊𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈.”

Luke Dumas’ A History of Fear was one of my favourite books of 2022, so you can bet that I was ecstatic to be able to read his next.

Part ghost story, part a study in grief and loss, part mystery, Dumas weaves a tale that had me enthralled from beginning to end. You can’t help but love protagonist, Dr. Simon Nealy, even as he grapples with his grief over the disappearance of his sister many years ago and ghosts of the past that won’t stay buried (literally… there are ghost dinosaurs that roam the halls of the Hawthorne Museum at night that are genuinely creepy!!) It’s easy to tell that Dumas has a passion for palaeontology, with lots of technical speak and research included in the narrative. The inclusion of the Covid lockdowns add to the atmospheric setting of the empty museum and increase Simon’s feeling of isolation (it also allowed for some humorous moments with Simon’s frustration around virtual Zoom meetings, with a freezing screen and chunks of conversations missing!) There are some great secondary characters that are easy to love, including Fran and Evie, and some that are easy to hate (I sometimes wondered why upper management hired Simon at all if they were going to make fun of them all the time). Like A History of Fear and its epistolary nature, Dumas uses unique aspects to further tell the story, with the journal entries of Dr. Mueller (including dinosaur sketches), a redacted email, and cut up letters in mysterious notes. I love these elements and hope they continue in Dumas’ next book too.

The Palaeontologist is a story of guilt, loss, forgiveness, and protection. It cements Dumas’ place in telling unique horror-mysteries that are unputdownable. Thank you to Atria and NetGalley for the ARC!

This book reminded me of night at the museum gone wrong. It was such a fun read! Simon was such a great main character. This book was well written and you could tell that the author did his research. I will definitely be picking up more books by them.

Archeological mysteries are some of my favorites, so I was ecstatic to delve into, “The Paleontologist,” by Luke Dumas.

Initially hoping that the novel would center around relic hunters digging for fossils and dinosaur remains, I was frustrated to discover that it’s actually more of an exceedingly long journey retelling the adolescent movie versions of nights at a museum with twists of not-so-scary things that go bump and screech into the night

Furthermore, the novel is full of characters that are evil, strange or just unlikeable—especially protagonist, Dr. Nealy, who is repeatedly described and portrayed as a lonely, depressed, 110-pound adult, but child-like, gay male PhD scientist.

Dumas, to his credit, provides excellent insights into paleontology and dinosauric biology in “The Paleontologist” that also explores a decades old missing child/murder mystery; corruption and misappropriation at a nonprofit organization; as well as some arcane esoterica thrown into the mix—the later never being fully resolved to my satisfaction—especially pertaining to once mentioned rituals performed by a mysterious group that may or may not have occurred at the museum.

JoyReaderGirl1 graciously thanks NetGalley, Author Luke Dumas, and Publisher Altria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Books, Inc., for this advanced reader’s copy (ARC) for review.

An admirable sophomore novel! While I didn't love this as much as Dumas's debut, the author proves that he's very capable of writing engaging thrillers. I really loved how perfectly Dumas captured the dynamics and stress of museum work & hierarchies (I only have narrowly escaped that fate, I have an Art History degree and am now firmly ensconced in the library world), and I also really appreciated how he depicted our main character as very much a gay man even though he doesn't experience a romance during the story. (A deeply correct decision, imo.) I also really liked how our main character is grappling with unsettled grief -- both for the live and the dead -- and how that's a major factor in his motivations.

However, there were a few things that didn't work for me -- and to be fair, those were mainly issues with me, not the book. I am extremely picky when it comes to thrillers, and it's a genre that I don't read a lot of because of that; so when I requested this book, I did so because I thought that the horror elements would be more predominant, as they were in Dumas's last book. Unfortunately for me, this novel is much heavier on the thriller side, with the horror being moreso for flavor. I do also wish that there had been more of a commitment to either the supernatural or to reality. I think the blurring of those boundaries worked well in the author's last book due to the nature of the subject; however with this book, it made the horror element feel less developed than it should be, and the thriller elements didn't mesh as well because of it. I also wish that the end had wrapped up a little more slowly and complexly, but that's just my taste.

Overall, a solid second book! I would recommend if you're looking for a thriller with a dash of supernatural horror thrown in. I'm very much planning to continue to read from this author, I really enjoy his work!!

I wanted to like this more than I actually did like it. Dinosaurs, ghosts, mysteries, a long lost sister, it all sounded amazing. The execution ... not as great.
I want to thank NetGalley for letting me read this, and admit that I did have a lot of fun with some of the ideas. Maybe it would have been better if it was a little shorter? It was definitely horrifying and sad and exciting, but it also kind of dragged. I do still recommend it and I am interested in reading more books by this author.

I had fun with this novel! It really brought back that nostalgia of watching Jurassic Park and arguing about which dinosaur is best with your cousin. This novel tied together multiple mysteries while throwing in some dinosaur ghosts, and really how can you not love that?
I did appreciate how the author wove the different mysteries of the novel together, with a couple twists thrown in to keep things interesting. Now I will say that as far as the who-dunnit aspect of the MC's long ago kidnapped sister, I caught on pretty quick to the culprit. Although I will admit that while I did guess the culprit correctly, it DID come about in a different way than what I was thinking.
I really enjoyed the late-night scenes in the museum and would have loved to see these drawn out  a little more for maximum suspense.
Overall, I thought this was such a creative twist of murder/supernatural mystery and I would love to see more in this niche genre!
Thank you NetGalley, Atria Books, and Luke Dumas for a digital copy of the novel in exchange for my feedback

Living in Chicago, I love the Field Museum references. It's a fun combination of horror/haunting and paleontology/dinosaur history. The ending has a great and unexpected twist!

{3.5 stars}

“How one act of violence can impact so many. One moment of evil, or desperation. How even the simplest, most innocent act of survival - to eat, or defend oneself, or soothe one’s pain - makes waves. Ripples across the planet, and millions of years.”

——————

Do dinosaurs generate ghosts when they die? Do they have feelings?

This story answers that in the most original way. I'm not sure I have ever read such a unique book. Simon is a paleontologist with some demons in his past. His life takes a bit of a turn and he finds himself working at the museum where his sister disappeared decades earlier. He is in charge of putting together a new exhibit with a dinosaur skeleton that has been languishing in storage for years. As he begins to investigate the skeleton's origin, he also unearths evidence relating to his sister's disappearance. The deeper he goes, the more haunted he becomes.

As a science and dinosaur nerd, I loved the paleontology related elements of this one. There was a good balance of those elements with the mystery and spookiness. The creativity of the dinosaur haunting and the way it weaved with Simon's own story was really cool. The baddie was a little obvious though, I knew who it was as soon as they were introduced. But the motive took a bit longer to work out.

Thanks to Atria Books for gifted access via Netgalley. All opinions above are my own.

Dr. Simon Nealy is going to the best and worst place of his life. He is now the youngest director of Paleontology and curator of Dinosauria at the Hawthorne Museum. Twenty two years ago, his sister was abducted from the museum. The Hawthorne is crumbling from lack of care and struggling to stay financially solvent with the lack of admissions due the Covid pandemic. He has come back to save himself and just maybe the museum. This is a well written tale with a little spooky and a lot of dinosaur details. I really enjoyed it.
Thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for the eARC and the opportunity to post my honest review of The Paleontologist by Luke Dumas.
4 stars – Pub. Date: October 31, 2023

THIS BOOK!!! I had chills the whole way through. When Simons sister disappears from the very museum he now works for, there is something there, Simon can feel it and after he finds the ramblings of his predecessor ... HOLY HECK!!

I loved the museum and all the hairs kept standing up on the back of my neck! The book was so atmospheric I was drawn in and shook hard!

I don't think I have read a book this good in a very long time from the horror genre, I am very critical of horrors when they don't meet my expectations for being terrorfied. I felt for Simon, I really did. I loved the balance the book had!

4 stars

thank you for my gifted copy